TORONTO - Most college and university students who take out loans to pay for their studies expect to graduate with more than $20,000 of debt, a new study suggests.

The BMO survey says that about half of post-secondary students are taking on debt for school, and 58 per cent of those with loans expect to owe upwards of $20,000 when they finish school.

One-fifth, or about 21 per cent, expect to graduate with more than $40,000 in debt.

About 44 per cent of those students with debt believe they will be able to pay off their loans within five years of graduating.

Students in Atlantic Canada expect to owe the most and take the longest to pay it down.

About a quarter of students in the eastern provinces expect to owe more than $40,000, and only 30 per cent say they will be able to pay off their debt within five years.

BMO Bank of Montreal vice president Lily Capriotti says students should think about how they will repay their debt early on.

"Students often underestimate the amount of debt they will accumulate or the length of time it will take to pay it off," she says.

Average tuition in Canada was $5,366 last year, and average student debt at graduation climbed to $18,800 in 2005 — the latest year for which statistics are available — from $15,200 a decade earlier, according to Statistics Canada.

The survey, conducted by Pollara, polled more than 1,000 post-secondary students and is considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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How Canada's Debt Burden Compares

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Canada hit a record high in the first quarter of 2011, reaching $1.5 trillion in household debt. If spread evenly across Canada, that means every family with two children has $176,461 in debt.
In the U.S., household debt hit $11.5 trillion by the end of March this year. The average household debt in the U.S. for a family of four is $148,000.

With their debt ceiling raised again, the U.S. has more than $14 trillion in government debt in the first quarter of 2011. Canada has more than $563 billion. That figure works out to 84 per cent of Canada's GDP, compared to 58.9 per cent for the U.S.

In the first quarter of 2011, the average Canadian had more than $3,500 in credit card debt, according to TransUnion Canada. In the U.S., the average American consumer owes more than $4,200 in credit card debt.

As of June 2011, the median cost of a home in Canada was $372,000. Vancouver, Victoria and Toronto are some of the most expensive places in the country to buy a house. Prices in the U.S. vary more than they do in Canada. As of June, the median price of a home in the Northeast was $261,000, while the median price in the Midwest was $147,000. The median in the South was $159,100 and in the West, it was $240,400.
The average price of a home in the UK is £232,628 as reported by their first quarter in 2011, which converts to around CAD $371,000.

In 2010, there were more than 1.5 million non-business bankruptcy filings in the U.S. In the same year, there were only 92,694 personal bankruptcies in Canada. That means there were 48 bankruptcies per 10,000 people in the U.S., and 28 bankruptcies per 10,000 in Canada.